Lectures on the French Revolution

by Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton Acton

That trying humiliation marks the loftiest moment in the reign of Lewis XVI. He had stood there, with the red cap of liberty on his powdered head, not only fearless, but cheerful and serene. He had been in the power of his enemies and had patiently defied them. He made no surrender and no concession while his life was threatened. The Girondins were not recalled, and the movement failed. For the moment the effect was injurious to the revolutionary party, and useful to the king. It was clear that menace and outrage would not move him, and that more was wanted than the half-hearted measures of the Gironde.

The outrage of June 20 was a contumelious reply to Lafayette's letter of the 16th, and the time had come for more than the writing of letters. His letter had been well received, and the Assembly had ordered it to be printed. The Girondins, by pretending that it could not be authentic, had prevented a vote on the question of sending it to the departments. He could count on the Feuillant majority, on the ministry composed of his partisans, on his popularity with the National Guard. As he was at the head of an army, his advice to the king to adopt a policy of resistance implied that he would support him in it. He now wrote once more, that he could never maintain his ground against the Prussians unless there was a change in the state of things in the capital. On the morning of June 28, immediately after his letter, he appeared in the Assembly, and denounced the sowers of disorder who were disorganising the State. Having obtained a vote of approval, by 339 to 234, he appealed to the National Guard to stand by him against his Jacobins. He summoned a meeting of his friends, but the influence of the Court caused it to fail, and he was compelled to return to his camp, having accomplished nothing. He imagined one chance more. He now put forward his colleague, General Luckner, who was incompetent but, not being a politician, was not distrusted, and they were jointly to rescue the king, and bring him to a city of refuge.

The revolutionists could now lay their plans without fear of the army. They summoned fédérés from the departments for the anniversary of July 14, and it was arranged that sturdy men should be sent from Brest and Marseilles to be at their orders when they struck the final blow. Paris could not be relied on. The failure there had been complete. On June 21, and on the 25th, the Cordeliers attempted to renew, with better effect, the attack which had been baffled by a divided purpose on the 20th. But their men would not move. The minister, Montciel, gave orders that the departments should not send fédérés to Paris, and he succeeded in stopping all but a couple of thousand. Nothing could be done until the contingents from the seaports arrived. The crisis was postponed, and some weeks of July were spent in parliamentary warfare. Here the Girondins had the lead; but the Feuillants were the majority in the Assembly, while the Jacobins were supreme in Paris. The Girondins were driven into a policy both tortuous and weak. The Republic would give power to one of their enemies as the Monarchy gave it to the other. All they could do was to increase hostile pressure on the king, in the hope of bringing him to terms with them. They oscillated between open attack and secret negotiation and offers of defence.

Lewis was inclined to accept a scheme for his deliverance which was arranged by his ministers in conjunction with the generals. He was to have been taken to Compiégne, within reach of the army. But the army meant Lafayette, and Lafayette would only consent to restore the king as the hereditary chief of a commonwealth, who should reign, but should not govern. The queen refused to reign under such conditions, or to be saved by such hands. The security for her was in power, not in limitations to power. The sacred thing was the ancient Crown, not the new Constitution. Lally Tollendal came over from England, conferred with Malouet and Clermont Tonnerre, and exhorted her to consent. Morris, whose ready pen had put the American Constitution into final shape five years before, aided them in drawing up an amended scheme of government to be proclaimed when they should be free. But the strong will and stronger passion of the queen prevailed. When all was accurately combined, and the Swiss troops were on the march to the rendezvous, the king revoked his orders, and on July 10 the Feuillant ministry resigned, and the Girondins saw power once more within their grasp. They had vehemently denounced the king as the cause of all the troubles of the State, and on July 6 the assault had been interrupted for a moment by a scene of emotion, when the bishop of Lyons obtained a manifestation of unanimous feeling in the presence of the enemy.

On July 11 the Assembly passed a vote declaring the country in danger, and on the 22nd it was proclaimed, to the sound of cannon. It was a call to arms, and placed dictatorial power in the hands of government. Different plans were proposed to keep that power distinct from the executive, and the idea which afterwards developed into the Committee of Public Safety now began to be familiar. On July 14 the anniversary of the Bastille and of the Federation of 1790 was celebrated on the Champ de Mars; the king went up to the altar, where he swore fidelity to the Constitution, with a heavy heart; and the people saw him in public for the last time until they saw him on the scaffold. It was near the end of July when the Girondins saw that the king would not take them back, and that the risk of a Jacobin insurrection, as much against them as against the throne, was fast approaching. Their last card was a regency, to be directed by them in the name of the Dauphin. Vergniaud suggested that the king should summon four conspicuous members of the Constituent Assembly to his Council, without office, to make up for the obscurity of his new ministers. At that moment Brunswick's declaration became known, some of the forty-eight sections in which the people of Paris deliberated demanded the dethronement of the king, and the Marseillais, arriving on the 30th, five or six hundred strong, made it possible to accomplish it.

These events, coinciding almost to a day, conveyed power from the Assembly to the municipality, and from the Girondins to the Jacobins, who had the municipality in their hands, and held the machinery that worked the sections. In a letter written to be laid before the king, Vergniaud affirmed that it was impossible to dissociate him from the allies who were in arms for his sake, and whose success would be so favourable to his authority. That was the argument to which no royalist could reply. The country was in danger, and the cause of the danger was the king. The Constitution had broken down on June 20. The king could not devote himself to the maintenance of a system which exposed him to such treatment, and enabled his adversaries to dispose of all forces in a way that left him at the mercy of the most insolent and the most infamous of the rabble. He had not the instincts of a despot, and would easily have been made content with reasonable amendments. But the limit of the changes he sought was unknown, unsettled, unexplained, and he was identified simply with the reversal of the Constitution he was bound by oath to carry out.

The queen, a more important person than her husband, was more openly committed to reaction. The failure of the great experiment drove her back to absolutism. As she repudiated the émigrés in 1791, so she now repudiated the constitutionalists, and chose rather to perish than to owe her salvation to their detested aid. She looked for deliverance only to the foreigners slowly converging on the Moselle. Her agents had excluded a saving allusion to constitutional liberty in the manifesto of the Powers; and she had dictated the threats of vengeance on the inhabitants of Paris.

The king himself had called in the invaders. His envoy, concealed in the uniform of a Prussian major, rode by the side of Brunswick. His brothers were entering France with the heavy baggage of the enemies, and Breteuil, the agent whom he trusted more than his brothers, was preparing to govern, and did in September govern, the provinces they occupied, under the shelter of their bayonets. For him the blow was about to fall—not for his safety, but for his plenary authority. The purpose of the allied sovereigns, and of the émigrés who prompted them, stood confessed. They were fighting for unconditional restoration, and both as invaders and as absolutists the king was their accomplice. The country could not make war with confidence, if the military power was in the hands of traitors. The king could protect them from the horrors with which they were threatened on his account, not as the head of the executive, but as a hostage. He was a danger in his palace; he would be a security in prison. All this was obvious at the time, and the effect it had was to disable and disarm the friends of the constitutional king, so that no resistance was offered when the attack came, although it was the act of a very small part of the population. The Girondins no longer displayed a distinct policy, and scarcely differed from their former associates, of June, except by their wish to suspend the king, and not to dethrone him. The final question, as to monarchy, regency, or republic, was to be left to the Convention that was to follow. Pétion was persuaded that he would soon be the Regent of France. He received a large sum of money from the Court; and it was in reliance on him, and on some less conspicuous men, that the king and queen remained obstinately in Paris. At the last moment Liancourt offered them a haven in Normandy; but Liancourt was a Liberal of the Constituante, and therefore unforgiven. Marie Antoinette preferred to trust to Pétion and Santerre.

Early in August the most revolutionary section of Paris decided that the king should be deposed. The Assembly rescinded the vote. Then the people of that section and some others made known that they would execute their own decree, unless the Assembly itself made it unnecessary and accomplished legally what would otherwise be done by the act of the sovereign people, superseding all powers and standing above law. Time was to be allowed until August 9. If the king was still on the throne upon the evening of that day, the people of Paris would sound the tocsin against him.